Published: | Updated: | Reading Time: 6 mins
I am a big fan of Halloween and Autumn in general. (Mostly because I like wearing my hacker hoodie and Autumn is the best season for that.) Almost every year a bunch of indie horror developers get together and submit demos for their upcoming games to the PS1 Demo Disc or Madvent Calendar. I'm a huge fan of these demos and retro indie horror as a genre. I've played a few of these demos during a friend's Holloween party but this was just a laptop with a wireless keyboard/mouse hooked up to their tv. It's functional but for Holloween I feel like I need to go all out and give it PS1 Ben Drowned vibes. I need the device to feel haunted; like I picked it up from sketchy mage-dude.
The basic idea is to find a broken Playstation 1, slap some x86 board in it, plug in some original (analog) ps1 controllers, and load up the PS1 Demo Discs.
Unfortunitely I'm going to have to use Steam's Big Picture Mode since some of these games don't natively support controllers and Steam makes this super easy.
This is a double-sided sword. It creates some complications. The initial idea was to create an account on the machine that didn't require a password and boot up straight to some splashscreen showing the games. (Like a console.) But if I do this my steam account is at risk and more importantly my other "normal" games will show up unless I hide them. As far as I know hiding games isn't device specific so this would affect my main gaming pc aswell. I could make an account specifically for this machine. Steam doesn't require anything other than an email to spin up an account and 15$ worth of purchases to unlock everything a standard account gets. (not that this really matters for this use case).
However on the otherhand, this gives us easy access to proton, big picture mode, and whatever you call how smoothly they handle controllers and shim them for non-controller games. It's also very easy to add non-steam games into your library so they can take advantage of all of these features. Using Steam also allows me to easily integrate horror/ARG youtube videos or horror films.
There is a small community around creating skins for Steam which might be something I want to look into since I think the current look is a bit too new for my horrorbox.
When I initially started looking for Broken PS1s eBay only found 1 ps1 and it was working. I don't really want to buy a working ps1 just to gut it. Sony isn't making ps1s anymore so there's what we currently have is what we have and I imagine there is someone out there who wants an original ps1. (As someone with an original N64 I get it.)
The next day eBay gave me a huge amount of Broken PS1s so I'm not quite sure what happened there. I bought a beige "for parts" ps1 that looked like it was in good cosmetic condition.
I also found a site that has the dimensions of the original Playstation: https://www.dimensions.com/element/playstation. This will be useful for finding a suitable sbc.
I couldn't find any working analog ps1 or dualshock 1 (the difference is the dualshock has motors) controllers. So I picked up two dualshock 2 controllers. They are visually similar enough to where you have to know what to look for when distinguishing between the dualshock 1 and 2 controllers. I learned that the connector the ps1 and 2 controllers use is the same so I picked up 2 ps1-2 to usb converters. These will be retrofitted into the controller ports so plugging in the controllers will be seamless.
I decided on a bearbones skull canyon nuc for the sbc. The chasis dimentions fit in the ps1: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/89187/intel-nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk/specifications.html. The igpu is an "Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580". It's not the greatest and I have some concerns about it's power that made me look into a hades canyon nuc. Hades Canon NUCs have a much more powerful "AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH". It's also a bit bigger but should still fit into the ps1: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/nuc8i7hvkva-product-brief.pdf. The biggest issue is that the price is double that of a skull canyon nuc and I can't currently justify that price.
I also bought a super cheap 256gb samsung evo 970 nvme drive for the nuc. I might regret not going for a 512gb or 1024gb drive since that dramatically reduces the amount of movies, youtube videos, and games I can store on the machine. I haven't checked the total size of all of those games but I'm hoping they'll all fit without issues. I'm planning on using linux so the os taking up a bunch of space won't be an issue. I can also always drop tailscale on it and have it talk to my jellyfin server. Or try to re-encode all the videos to be as small as possible without loosing too much quality.
I also bought a single 8gb stick of ram for the nuc. I don't expect to need more than that but if I do I have some sodimm ram laying around I can use. (Assuming there's a second sodimm slot.)